[drdaeman]

How a self-hosted service prevents you from having channels with customers or whatever else Slack offers?

The only upside of third-party SaaS is that you don't have to bother yourself to set things up and maintain them. Otherwise, I really don't see any limits that Slack can do but a self-hosted system can't.

[Sanddancer]

I'm involved in a few communities that have slack setups. One of the other nice things that Slack offers is that I only need to have one login to all of them. That's something that none of the self-hosted systems can do right now.

[drdaeman]

Not sure I understand.

What prevents you from using a same identity to log in to multiple self-hosted instances?

I think it's the same. As far as I get it - haven't used Slack much - with Slack you either have to use different email address to create account for each team (subdomain), or you have to be explicitly invited. Or maybe I got a wrong idea. Either way, while I'm not sure all self-hosted alternatives have options to consume external identities (be it third-party leased ones like Google account or self-originating ones), at least some have those. Which means the authentication is fairly transparent.

[Sanddancer]

I'm talking about using slack as a member of various groups, with very different focuses. The fact that it is centralized means I don't need to have Yet Another Server I have to remember the address to, the username, the password, etc, and enter in on my desktop, my laptop, my mobile, etc. Plus, if one of those decentralized instances has a mobile app, chances are, I'd have to put in configuration info there for each and every service. Self-hosted communications services quickly become a pain in the ass when you end up needing to deal with more than a couple, and sometimes centralizing things a bit is an actual benefit.

[s73v3r]

You still have to create accounts on all of them. And if you mistype your password on one, you'll have to change it, and either you have to remember that there's one with a changed password, or go and change your password on all of them. And what if someone's taken your regular name on one of them?

[driverdan]

That's not really a problem though. Everyone uses 20 different communications platforms. SMS, Hangouts, Hipchat, Slack, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Whatsapp, etc all have different logins.

It may be nice to combine them in one place but it won't prevent anyone from using them.

[drdaeman]

The problem is, there is no standard for truly owned identities besides usernames and passwords, and those are frowned upon as "different accounts". And many services seem to not want any interoperability at authentication layer and to accept third party (esp. competitors') assertions as credentials.

This applies to Slack too - to best of my knowledge, one can't log in there, using, say, GitHub identity assertion as a credential.

But I'm not sure how Slack has anything to do with this. You're right. They're just a yet another platform with its own non-interoperable account system. Don't see how it's better than anything other, except when everyone is already there, which I find hard to believe. (But any other platform that knows how to consume external credentials is wins in this regard.)

[pbreit]

Doesn't prevent it. But since it's sub-optimal, it never happens.